I was in a bit of a panic when I realized that the Tormach automatically adds about an 8 second dwell to get the spindle up to speed and about 3 seconds to stop it. I need to run the "spindle", which has actually been removed, at full speed in order to get the 5 volt output signal that it takes to fire the laser. The laser power settings are adjusted in separate laser software and I just need to fire it with a 5 to 24 volt signal. I found I can get an M3 controlled 5 volts, but the spindle needs to be at full speed otherwise I get a linear fraction of that 5 volts. It takes a real motor a long time to get up to that speed. They allow a full 8 seconds, and I couldn't find a way to remove it. The laser would burn halfway to China with an 8 second dwell. I looked for ways to use the m11p1 command as seen in this forum, but those didn't look to be compatible with the Tormach motion board, which has no extra input capacity as far as I'm aware. The 5 volt signal was instant with an M3 command, but it was about 8 seconds before table movement could commence. I was relieved to find that I could set the control to look at any dwell in milliseconds, so the 8 second dwell became .008 second instead. I can then manually add dwell time for the laser pierce in the code. I am still looking for a way to have the dwell stay the same throughout the code. Maybe I could use a variable defined at the top of the program and that gets repeated throughout the program any time the m3 command is activated? Not too elegant, but it might work.
Everything is set up including the enclosure, so I'm just waiting on a tech to come do the official install.